


Carlsbad, 1990

by mightbeanasshole



Series: Immortal Outlaws [1]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood Kink, Bloodplay, Immortals, Knifeplay, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 05:21:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3883930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightbeanasshole/pseuds/mightbeanasshole
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ramsey drags trouble behind him like a wake in water everywhere he goes. He looks different when he shows up at Ray’s double-wide that day in 1990--tan and taller than Ray remembered and looking every inch like leather that had been nicely broken in until it was strong and supple and radiating. But weary. Much more weary these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carlsbad, 1990

Ramsey drags trouble behind him like a wake in water everywhere he goes.

Ray had ignored it for a long time. A long goddamn time. Ramsey’s younger than him by a long shot, after all. And making bad decisions is practically a part of the fabric of Ramsey’s existence. It’s his heritage and his destiny.

Ray gets it, of course. (Although there had been a long run there when Ray had looked at the company Ramsey kept and wondered if he’d finally given into the great big cosmic pull of things and lost his goddamned mind. But it had passed, albeit dramatically.)

The past few decades had treated Ramsey better and each time he’d stopped by Ray’s base of operations in New Mexico, he’d looked healthier. Where the flow of time seemed to press a hard thumb down onto Ray, it had made Ramsey seem by all accounts like a free man at last.

He looks different when he shows up at Ray’s double-wide that day in 1990–tan and taller than Ray remembered and looking every inch like leather that had been nicely broken in until it was strong and supple and radiating.

But weary. Much more weary these days.

Ray lets him into the dim home cautiously and neither of them says a thing at first, but Ramsey doesn’t miss Ray’s eyes raking towards the door.

“I’m alone,” he says. Ray peers into his eyes and detects no lie there.

“Grand,” Ray says, finally. “Good to see you.”

“Good to see your old carcass too, Ray,” Ramsey says, his face breaking into a smile now that the moment of tension has passed. When Ramsey is happy to see his old friend, it’s a good sign. Means he doesn’t need anything. A homecoming and not an errand. The last bit of alarm drains out of Ray’s cells.

Ray’s kitchen is mostly neglected but the clean, old linoleum, the folding chairs and card table makes as good a place as any to set up.

“Think the last time I drug this out was the last time you stopped by,” Ray admits as he produces a bottle of brown liquor from the depths of a storage cabinet.

“What was that… ‘83?”

“You’ll have to consult your log and get back to me on that,” Ray admits. The younger man is much better at keeping up with the passage of time than Ray is, but saying it out loud means rubbing a sore spot, so he doesn’t.

Ramsey has produced a roll of suede, laid it out on the table, and as Ray brings over the bottle and the tumbler of ice, Ramsey begins to unroll it ceremoniously with those large hands, gray with layers of tattoos.

“New hobby,” Ramsey says, once the roll is completely opened up. “Thought it might be up your alley.” His smile at Ray is smug now and Ray does his best not to react to the sight on the table. Methodically, he puts the bottle down, the glass, and takes a seat opposite Ramsey.

He’s spread out a collection of knives. Fixed blades. Wooden handles. The familiar, distinct tiger stripes of damascus steel on each one. The surfaces sharpened and polished to a mirror.

It feels like a trap and Ray’s muscles go taut, waiting for the catch.

“You make these or lift ‘em?” he asks finally.

“Made,” Ramsey says, that smug look still plastered across the weathered face. He’s shaved his mustache, Ray realizes finally. He looks younger and at the same time more tired, less defined.

“Funny to find you with a hobby like that when you had plenty of time to learn from Pattillo and never did,” Ray says. Ramsey frowns at the name but it does nothing to deter him.

“You can touch ‘em,” Ramsey says, watching Ray watch him. “Keep ‘em even if you want. It’s not like I have a damn thing better to do than make more.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ray says quickly.

Ramsey puffs a laugh through his nose at that and he reaches out to select a knife. Its got a short blade like a paring knife, but infinitely sharper–Ray can tell just by looking–than something you’d find in any regular kitchen.

“Why not?” Ramsey asks, looking down at the knife instead of Ray. “No playmates in Carlsbad?”

Ray watches then as Ramsey drags the flat side of the blade up the underside of his right forearm. He’d forgotten the man was a southpaw.

“None that can play the way I want,” Ray says, unable to keep himself from making the comment now–the sight of the steel against Ramsey’s skin, denting it in just so, making it impossible for him to keep his cool now.

“None like me,” Ramsey says. It’s not a question. Ray already knows that he’s under the other man’s spell now.

But Ramsey doesn’t need anything supernatural on his side.

He’s seduction personified as he bites down on his lower lip and runs the sharp side of the blade gently across the pad of his right thumb. The movement is potent, not the teasing threat he’d made with the forearm. He’s cut himself and the dynamic between them is already shifting. Ramsey draws in a little breath through his nose, pathetic sounding almost, and for a moment the line where he’s cut his own skin stays pale.

“Hm,” he says, sighing, regarding his own thumb. “So sharp it doesn’t hurt at first. So sharp it’s like the skin forgets to bleed.”

And he’s right: it takes a moment for the skin to part ever so slightly, for blood to well up there in the perfect line–just an inch or so.

The cut begins to bleed in earnest. He’d gotten himself deeper than Ray thought at first, and the blood is impossibly dark, welling there at the surface until the weight of the hot fluid is too much–and it trembles there on the pad of his thumb until finally physics takes over and the blood streaks down across the heel of his hand, down to his wrist, snaking down the tattooed forearm.

“I don’t want to do this,” Ray says. He realizes he’s been gritting his teeth as he watched, as if he could will the blood to coagulate, the wound to seal itself.

“Yeah you do,” Ramsey says. His eyes are half closed but still so blue.

“I really don’t need this shit today,” Ray says.

“ _You_ might not,” Ramsey says, “but I do. I need someone who  _knows_ me, Ray. You know how bad it gets.”

The words don’t make him feel good. They make Ray feel like he’s felt for too long: a means to an end. He was wrong when he decided Ramsey had come to him without asking for anything this time. The man had come with hands open, asking for much too much.

“Don’t take it like that,” Ramsey says, as if the man can read his mind. Hell, maybe Ramsey  _can_ when he gets like this. “I want  _you_ , Ray. Just knew you’d take some convincing, is all.”

The blood has reached Ramsey’s elbow now, is dripping onto the cheap card table.

“Sorry to make a mess of your kitchen,” he says abruptly. “I can get on my way if the answer is no.”

And Ramsey knows full well that the answer isn’t no as he stands, putting Ray face to face with a the shape of a prominent erection straining against his jeans. Ray flushes, looks up at Ramsey–who isn’t done by a long shot–and the man lifts his arm and licks the path of blood up his own tattooed skin. 

There’s too much of the thick liquid to get in one go and he only succeeds in smearing the blood over the gray patterns as he follows the heavy stream with his mouth–until finally he reaches his thumb. He swallows, exaggerated, before dragging the pad of his thumb across his tongue, letting the dark liquid smear across it.

Fuck it, Ray thinks. He’s already standing, crossing the kitchen, walking Ramsey backwards until he’s against the formica counter, Ray’s hand tight around Ramsey’s blood-smeared wrist, digging into the skin, hoping it hurts. And Ramsey lets that muffled laugh loose, the “ _hun hun hun_ ” that rolls deep in his chest, as Ray sucks around the finger–warm and alive and throbbing against his tongue, tasting like nothing else, like the earth turned into a flavor, like mortality and rest and sleep and peace. 

Ray groans around the finger. He hates and loves this exchange in equal parts–knowing that it’s only going to make him want this more, all the time, on demand, and knowing that the minute Ramsey tears off across the desert away from Ray’s trailer for another decade, it’s unlikely that anyone else will show up on his doorstep who will be able to give this to him in the same way. All it takes is the first taste and he’s humming around the finger.

“You want to dig in, Ray?” Ramsey says in a low voice. “Draw patterns into my skin and then taste it flow out of me?” 

And although any seduction before this was purely instinct, it occurs to Ray that the fact that the man seems to know  _exactly_ what to say now might be beyond the realm of the natural. It’s like he’s pulling the words out of the most secret parts of Ray, and Ray is helpless under it, sucking around him, tasting him, feeling the man’s erection pressing against him through too many layers of fabric.

“I’d let you open me up, you know,” Ramsey says, his blue eyes dropping like he’s gone bashful under the suggestion. “Make a pretty mess of me that nobody could fix. You’d like to fuck me and then cut me and watch the lights go out, wouldn’t you?” 

Ray’s breath shudders at the thought. The complete submission.

“If you do, I want you to promise me you’ll make it hurt,” Ramsey says, his voice just a whisper now. “Let me cry and struggle–and then protect me while I rest. Would you do that for me?”

Ray’s not sure how long they’ve been standing there, grinding against each other, not sure at what point Ray got the hardest he can remember being, but by the time Ramsey stops talking, stops bleeding, Ray is beyond ruined. He’ll do anything to keep it going now and Ramsey knows it, too. Anything Ramsey asks.

“ _That well’s dry_ ,” Ramsey says, low. Something comes alive in Ray’s chest and he realizes that the man is no longer speaking English. They both regard his thumb: the skin perfectly intact now, not even the ghost of a scar. “ _Think you can find another?_ ”

The man presses the blade into Ray’s hand. Ray accepts it. He looks down at the knife, and Ramsey’s got his own shirt off before Ray can react. Ray assesses the other man’s torso–tan and criss-crossed with patterns. The naked skin–the inches that span with no tattoos–almost seems like a heightened nudity, and though Ray has seen every inch of the other man before, he’d forgotten the shock of the negative space that the tattoos create. He draws the knife just an inch across a patch of bare skin on Ramsey’s chest and the man doesn’t even react as he begins to bleed, as Ray’s tongue finds the skin there.

“Christ, Ray,” Ramsey says, a joke on his lips as he drops back into casual English. “You could at least bother to make it hurt.”

Ramsey’s hand finds Ray’s, starts to curl the knife out of his hand, and Ray looks up into his face. Had he already ruined this before they’d even gotten started?

“Come on old man,” Ramsey says with a gleaming smile. “Go big or go home.” And Ray watches as the other man’s tongue slips out of his mouth lewdly, watches as Ramsey slowly cuts a stripe down the wet muscle with the blade from the back of his mouth to the tip of his tongue, wincing around the blade now, screwing his eyes shut at the pain, blood flowing freely.

“ _Mouth heals the quickest, sunshine,_ ” Ramsey says affectionately, his voice strange with the injury–and he’s dropped back into that other tongue of theirs–his teeth rimmed with blood as he laughs. “ _Better move fast_.”

Ray needs no such encouragement as their mouths crash together, as their legs hook and their hips grind and they both pretend like the moment is dangerous, like the consequences are real, like they aren’t each of them just a means to an end. 


End file.
